


From Tui, to La

by eastaustraliancurrent



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (included in chapter two), Angst, Fanart, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Loss of Parent(s), Nightmares, Past Character Death, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28159266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eastaustraliancurrent/pseuds/eastaustraliancurrent
Summary: A face lost in the shadow of moonlight, returned to Sokka with the tide. Bato helps Sokka remember his mother.
Relationships: Bato & Sokka (Avatar)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 87
Collections: MMEU Winter Solstice Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leoperidot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/gifts).



It’s still too dark to see when Sokka wakes in the morning. He isn’t sure what woke him until he realizes that somehow his leg had managed to poke its way free of the blankets in his sleep and now is throbbing with a cold pain. He hisses through his teeth and sneaks it gingerly into bed again, careful not to jostle the rest of his sleeping family. Katara snuffles in her sleep but doesn’t stir, and Sokka thinks for a moment he’s managed it.

“Sokka?” his mother murmurs, voice low with sleep. Sokka rolls to face her, wincing at the spike of pain the movement sends through his leg.

“Sorry,” he whispers. His eyes are slowly adjusting, and it’s the blue darkness that precedes a sunrise filling the igloo. He can’t quite make out his mother’s face as she extends a hand to him. 

Sokka scoots closer to her, burrowing into her chest beneath the blankets.

“What are you doing up already?” his mother asks, running a hand through his hair. It’s just long enough for a wolf tail now, and Sokka has already been begging his father nonstop to shave the sides of his head. He keeps saying “soon,” but Sokka doesn’t see why he can’t do it now.

“My leg was cold,” Sokka says.

His mother hums, shifts beneath the blankets. She’s looking out the foggy window of ice, and Sokka follows her gaze. 

The moon is framed perfectly, warped and distorted by the thickness of the ice, obscured partially by snow. Sokka blinks. The moon shouldn’t be in this position right now, and he turns to his mother to see what she thinks, but she’s already turned away, as though nothing is off. It’s still too dark to see her face despite the moonlight filtering into the room, and she slides her torso out of the blankets, reaching for the qulliq.

“It’s too early, Mama,” Sokka protests softly. He pulls the blanket tighter so the cold air doesn’t seep in and wake up Katara and Dad.

His mother is silent as she lights the lamp, her back to Sokka. Sokka sits up so he can watch her fingers work in the dark, ignoring the stab of pain in his leg that still hasn’t dissipated. The qulliq flares to life, and Sokka glances nervously at Katara and Dad to make sure the light didn’t wake them.

“Mom…” he murmurs softly, hesitantly. 

He turns back to his mother and for a moment, he can’t see. She’s holding the qulliq between them now, the sudden light flaring across his sight, and he startles back, bringing his hands up to rub the blindness away. When he brings them back down, the light is filling his mother’s face so he can finally see it.

It’s empty. The light glares off it, reflective, as full and as blank as the moon.

—

It’s still too dark to see when Sokka wakes again, in the same bed that’s empty one person. There’s no moon in the window, no mother at his side, no face in his memory. But there’s still a strangled cry trapped in his throat and a throbbing pain in his leg.

He slides carefully out of bed and gets dressed quietly so he doesn’t wake his sister and his father, then fumbles for his crutch and stumbles out of their home as the sky begins to shine with the sunrise.

—

The soft crunch of snow beneath boots is the only greeting Bato makes as he crests a small hill to find Sokka that morning, sitting in the snow by himself, away from the tribe. Sokka responds in kind, a mere twitch to acknowledge the new presence as Bato lowers himself to sit beside the boy.

Bato gestures to Sokka’s crutch. “That’s clever,” he offers, and Sokka shrugs. He’s fastened some imitation of a snowshoe to the end of it to prevent it from sinking into the snow. It’s a freedom Sokka granted himself within hours of returning to the South, a freedom he uses, apparently, to isolate himself in the snowbanks. Bato needed to talk Hakoda out of sending a search party this morning, assuring him that his son actually wasn’t the little boy he had left behind, and was plenty capable of going off by himself, no matter how little any of them liked.

There’s a light breeze, the warmth of summer making the cold bite of the air bearable, and the pair sits in silence, looking out at the blank landscape around them. It looks empty, but Bato knows better. He spent his whole life helping his tribe carve something into the blinding white.

“It’s strange,” Bato tries, conversationally. “Coming home to this after seeing the world.”

Sokka sits quiet. Even when Bato squints it’s hard to find the little kid they left behind, all bright eyes and bright words. He hasn’t seen that kid much since the war ended. 

“So much color,” Bato continues. “So many people. New people. I always missed it. The people I know. The land I know.”

“It isn’t…” Sokka starts. He still hasn’t looked at him, his eyes fixed forward, far away. Bato follows his gaze respectfully, keeping the boy’s profile safely in his peripheral. “It wasn’t hard for you, coming back to this?”

Bato hums vaguely. “It’s what we fought for, isn’t it?”

“If I wanted to talk to my dad I would’ve,” Sokka scowls.

Bato laughs. “Sorry.” He thinks for a moment, wanting the answer to soothe Sokka but finding difficulty reconciling that impulse with the truth. He sighs and Sokka tenses, waiting.

“It was all I wanted for a while,” Bato admits. “I dreamed about it, in the abbey. I missed everyone. Home. But… it’s not the home I left. I can’t say that doesn’t hurt. The people are… different. It’s…” 

“Empty.”

Bato raises his eyebrows and even Sokka seems surprised at his own word choice. “Not quite what I was going to say,” Bato murmurs.

“I—” Sokka stops himself, drops his gaze to his feet, one scuffing the snow and the other stretched out, immobilized in bandages. He laughs quietly. “I was going to say I didn’t mean that, but that’s not really true.”

Bato waits. Sokka keeps kicking the snow, his other leg twitching in its bandages.

“I kinda built it up in my head, you know?” Sokka says. “The war and everything. And then I did that, and it’s all still wrong.” He twirls his fingers absently through the fur of his coat. “The village is still broken, Dad’s still being weird, and everyone’s still dead. I’m supposed to be the plan guy, but I’m so _tired_ . I _had_ a plan, and it worked, but—” Sokka sighs and drops his face into his hands. “It’s stupid,” he says, muffled.

Bato doesn’t say what Hakoda would, despite how much he wants to remind Sokka that he’s still a kid, that there are adults with plans, because he knows that a kid like Sokka who’s already saved the world once will never rest until he sees it healed. But, spirits, he’s a _kid_.

Bato puts a hand on the shoulder closest to him and when Sokka leans into the touch, he wraps it around both, pulling him close. “None of that sounds stupid to me,” Bato offers, and the words sound weak and insufficient but they’re all he has.

Sokka is tense beneath Bato’s arm, and Bato can feel when Sokka shakes his head minutely against his chest. “I wanted her—” Sokka coughs out a laugh, weak and reedy. Shakes his head again. “It’s so stupid.”

Bato squeezes Sokka’s shoulders, hopes his furs are thick enough to keep the tremor of his heartbeat from reaching the boy’s ears. The silence stretches along with Bato’s nerves.

People who don’t live with the snow think it’s quiet, muffling, but there are the little crackling, creaking noises that come out in the stillness, a crispness of sound that Bato missed for three years. Since he’s been home, however, there are times when it seems to hiss at him.

“What did you want?” Bato prompts.

“It’s stupid,” Sokka mumbles again. The snow gleams. Bato remembers when he first discovered its glare, by himself after a raid, holding a flower of ice so gingerly in his glove. He remembers it after the next raid, too, and the next, and the next. The way the snow erases, the way it’s always wiping itself clean.

“I wanted to see her,” Sokka finally whispers. “I wanted to win the war and fix the world and come home to Mom. I wanted her to brush the snow out of my hair and see how tall I am now. I wanted her to yell at Dad.” He laughs again, and this time the sound is wet, gasping. “I wanted her to be mad until he apologized and they hugged and it was all fixed.” Bato runs his hand up and down Sokka’s arm as the boy trembles against him, his words choked as they pour from his mouth. “I wanted to see her.”

Bato keeps rubbing Sokka’s arm as the boy tries not to cry into his parka. Bato wishes he would. “There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about her,” he murmurs. His words steam in the cold air around them, an offering of his own grief in return for Sokka’s. “You and your sister remind me of her every day. There’s so much of her in the both of you.” Sokka sniffles, and Bato smooths a hand over his hair. “You know, you look just like her.”

Sokka stills. Bato mentally castigates himself as he continues to brush back the boy’s hair, hoping to Tui and back that he didn’t just ruin everything.

When Sokka pulls away Bato regretfully lets him go. His eyes are bright, his color high as he frowns at Bato. “I do?” he asks, voice low.

Bato nods helplessly in the face of the child who appears so very much like his dead friend.

Sokka blinks once, twice, then turns and tosses his gaze to the landscape around them, searching almost desperately for a moment before turning back to Bato. “Do you have a mirror?” he asks breathlessly.

“What? No,” Bato says reflexively, and then Sokka is reaching for his crutch. “Sokka, what are you—” He reaches out to still Sokka’s near-frantic movements. “Sokka.”

“I— I have to see…” Sokka fits the crutch under his arm and then flails for a moment in the snow. Bato pushes himself to his feet and offers his hand.

“I don’t think we have a mirror,” he says gently as he pulls Sokka to his feet. “But maybe the water?”

“Yes!” Sokka exclaims. “The water, let’s go to the water.”

A ten minute walk to the shore and Sokka stubbornly refuses to pant, breaths shallow as he hobbles along to Bato’s purposefully slow pace. Bato knows better than to offer his assistance. The snow dissolves to rock beneath their boots and the low rumble of the tide over stones soothes through the air.

Before Bato can stop him, Sokka is stumbling into the water, likely ruining his bandages, but Bato says nothing, just wades in after and stands silent in the sea as Sokka stares down at the water swirling around his boots, his crutch. Their reflections warp in the tide, rippling in and out, tangling and glaring light. He sees his own face briefly, before it washes out, distorted, then clear again in the lull between waves. There’s something pale in his hair and he pinches it between his fingers, brings it to his face, only to see that it’s a streak of white he hadn’t noticed before.

Sokka is quiet, peering intently at his reflection, hunched over and leaning on his crutch. Bato looks to Sokka’s reflection and in the unstable fluidity of the water it’s even easier for his eyes to find Kya there.

“I don’t…” Sokka says. He bites his lip, eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

Bato waits for more, but nothing comes, so he rests a hand on the curve of Sokka’s back and peers over his shoulder at their reflections, wobbling side by side.

“Your nose.” Bato touches his own absent-mindedly, as if to demonstrate. “You’ve got her nose. And”— he gestures vaguely at their reflections— “her eyes. But you’ve got Hakoda’s brow.” Bato takes another moment to contemplate. “Her face was… rounder than yours. But you’ve got the same mouth. The same smile.”

In the water, Sokka’s reflection presses his lips together.

Bato smiles faintly. “The same frown.”

There’s a small disturbance in the water, a pinpoint of a ripple, then another, and it takes a few more occurrences for Bato to recognize the source. He pulls abruptly away from Sokka’s side, his hand bracing against the boy’s shoulder as he peers into his solid, real face. There are tears running down his cheeks, falling silently to the water. Salt returned to salt.

“Sokka…”

Sokka bites his lip and tilts his head back to the sky, as though asking the sun to dry his eyes, gravity to stop the fall of his tears, and Bato can’t have that. He tugs Sokka into his chest once more and this time the boy finally lets go, hands coming up to clutch the back of Bato’s furs as tears shake through his body.

They stand like that, the ocean swirling around their ankles, the clatter of rocks in their ears, and Bato holds Sokka until he pushes away first, gasping and apologizing and scrubbing the tears from his eyes.

“Don’t apologize,” Bato says gruffly as he wipes his own eyes. Sokka watches the motion, then dashes away a fresh tear and crutches his way out of the water.

On the way back to camp Sokka stumbles beneath the new weight of his waterlogged clothing, and Bato chances extending his hand. Sokka takes it after only a moment, abandoning his crutch to lean into the man. The sea water drips steadily in the snow behind them, tracing their path home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> illustrations for this fic and other concept sketches and comics for variations on the original prompt.

Some practice sketches of Sokka and Kya I did to get their resemblance down.

—

An earlier concept I didn't follow through with. It's a redraw of the scene where Azula looks into the mirror to see her own mother standing behind her.

—

Another concept for the prompt that I didn't feel the need to write a fic for. I imagine the aftermath of the attack for Sokka was very confusing and scary. In the scenario I imagined, Hakoda, his only parent left, would be too overcome with grief to help his children in the moment. Sokka is alone for a moment with his grieving sister, unsure of what exactly happened.

—

And finally, an illustration for this fic.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope my recipient enjoyed <3\. this was really fun to write!!
> 
> the ice flower was a little reference to meteor-sword's fic ["feathers and bones."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27573812) go check it out, it's super lovely!


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